Lauren Beukes in conversation

Join Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City, The Shining Girls and this year’s Bridge, in conversation with Suw Charman-Anderson about how she uses her journalism skills, including deep listening, to research her novels, the ethics of research, and how to reach out to and set up interviews. She’ll also be talking about how her diagnosis of ADHD changed her life, and the impact that moving to the UK had on her writing, her experience of seeing The Shining Girls adapted for TV, writers block, plus a lot more!

About Lauren

Lauren Beukes is the award-winning author of six novels, a collection of short stories, a pop history about South African women, and New York Times best-selling comics. Her work has been translated into 26 languages and won prizes across genres from the Arthur C Clarke Award to the Strand Critic’s Choice award and the University of Johannesburg Prize. Her novel, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer and the survivor who turns the hunt around is now a major AppleTV series with Elisabeth Moss. Her latest novel, Bridge, about a young woman’s search for her mother across realities is out now. She lives in London with a daughter and two cats.

Lauren can be found at the following links: Website, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube, SubStack, Bluesky.

Lauren’s books are available on Bookshop.org: Bridge, Zoo City, The Shining Girls, Afterland, Moxyland, Broken Monsters.

About Suw

Suw Charman-Anderson is a writer and campaigner. She publishes two newsletters for writers: Why Aren’t I Writing? explores the various faces of writer’s block, and Word Count is a regular round-up of useful and interesting links for writers, plus Suw’s own writing news. Her first novella, Argleton, was crowdfunded on Kickstarter and featured in their first ever newsletter. She’s currently working on Fieldwork, a comedy drama short film about ecologists working in the field which has been commissioned by the University of York, and Tag, a six-part urban fantasy TV series spec script.

Suw began writing professionally as a freelance music journalist in the late 90s, contributing to the Melody Maker and various trade magazines. She started writing about technology in the early 00s, and has written about social media, technology and digital rights for The Guardian, CIO Magazine, .Net Magazine, First Post, Computer Weekly, and Linux User & Developer, and about publishing and crowdfunding for Forbes.

In 2009, she founded Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in STEM, which raises women’s profiles and creates new role models to encourage girls and women to study and pursue careers in STEM. In 2005, she co-founded the Open Rights Group, a digital rights campaigning group.

Suw can be found at the following links: Website, Twitter, BlueSky, Substack.

Sign up for our newsletters

When you order tickets for this event, you'll be offered the opportunity to sign up to Lauren's and Suw's newsletters. Just tick the boxes for the newsletters you're interested in and we'll do the rest!